Posted By Todd Raphael On May 14, 2013 @ 1:07 pm In News and Features | 1 Comment

[1]You know what’s been happening seemingly every year, the last several: we start out the year talking about how the economy and job market are improving, and then as the year goes on, we start talking about how they are not.

Perhaps that won’t be the case this year, says Toby Dayton[1], from the job search engine LinkUp[2]. Dayton is “cautiously optimistic” about a decent second, third, and fourth quarter of 2013.

Dayton, speaking at the Recruiting Innovation Summit[3] in San Francisco, gives these three reasons for his optimism, based on LinkUp’s data showing growth in job posts and recruitment advertising:

Geographic balance. The energy boom is providing strength to the upper Midwestern U.S., but the job growth is spread evenly throughout the U.S.

Movement of job posts from larger to smaller company size. “Small business has finally started to hire again,” Dayton says. “We’ve got very good data showing that that is starting to occur.”

Transportation jobs are sharply increasing.

If anything could derail all this, Dayton says, it’ll be events in Washington, Europe, as well as whatever unexpected global events come our way. Also, he says, the actual unemployment rate could rise throughout parts of the year, even as the economy improves.